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Chapter 11: The Vatican's Long History of Forgery

Chapter 11: The Vatican's Long History of Forgery
This chapter starts with Lorenzo Valla's analysis exposing The Donation of Constantine as a forgery. In one sentence it then lumps a number of writings together, including the Decretals of Isidore and the Apostolic Constitutions, as if they are similar in the forgery quotient. (They are not.)

The chapter then has an interesting section on the Bodmer Papyrus 75 (P75). This is an area I have been studying but have not written about (we are also interested in P38 because of the Shepherd of Hermas issues). I'll say the position taken that P75 is a "fake", and a "massive deception" is interesting, yet unclear. Part of my concern comes from how I have seen Bill Cooper jump to conclusions in earlier chapters. This will need more study.

Note that there is no mention that the early thin-range dating of P75 has recently been subject to severe scrutiny and questioning, especially by Brent Nongbri (ie. even if authentic.) Cooper correctly questions the dating today "discovered (being arbitrarily dated - by whom we don't know - to AD 175-225)" but is not really up on the palaeographic dating scholarship and controversies.

Then there is a discussion of the Gospel of Jesus wife, not so relevant, except for showing where the authenticity issues are fought today. Returning to Bodmer, one key book is The Story of the Bodmer Papyri: From the First Monasterys Library in Upper Egypt to Geneva and Dublin by James M. Robinson, 2011, a book that is quite interesting and has a critical review by Tommy Wasserman.

My conclusion on this chapter is that it is interesting, a good start, and warrants further study. Especially P75, which is directly in the Vaticanus and Sinaiticus mix. Unlike other some other chapters, I don't see any red flags in the sense of clearly false assertions, however I recommend caution on this time on his P75 position.

Chapter 12: Conclusion

Chapter 12: Conclusion
The conclusion is a short, generally accurate section. It omits the issues like the corroboration of the physical (colour, condition) by the historical (the colouring noted by Simonides), and it does again assume the same scribe on the Mark ending.

Generally, it is a reasonable set of data involving showing that Sinaiticus is a recent production.

The first two are available online, so for those of us familiar with the controversy do not add anything. However, for newbies, the letter to the Guardian is helpful to have handy.

The next three have to do with the issue of the Jesuit hand behind the production. In general, this is a circumstantial case (that does not mean it is weak, it simply refers to the nature of the evidences) and thus, confirmatory documents are helpful. Without doing a check on the documents, I will say that they are helpful in considering the case that the Jesuits were actually the force behind the production and maneuvering of Sinaticius into the textual sphere.

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The Bibliography is generally good, I plan to enter a couple of the special notes here. A number of books on Romanism, an example is Christopher Bush Coleman on the Donation of Constantine.

The David V. Daniels videos are not referenced (two are on the colouring) nor the SART website www.sinaiticus.net. Nor the CARM and BCHF forums that clearly were the original source for a lot of the information, as referenced on this site. It is unclear whether Bill Cooper kept up on the Facebook discussions.

On the major publications, Jongkind "Scribal Habits", and Skeat & Milne "Scribes & Correctors" are examples of surprising omissions. Some books may be in the bibliography based on 3rd party quotes, the Memoir of Simonides by Charles Stewart is an example.

The last two entries are:

Online Mediahttp://purebibleforum.com -
an ongoing lively discussion and exploration of all things Sinaiticus run by Steve Avery.

Q43f-lr bears a mysteriously hideous overwriting - an ugly scrawl really - over the entire page. There is no accounting for the necessity of such disfigurement other than to suppose that some clumsy agent was trying to work out the stichometry of the text that had been erased. But to what end? The text is the beginning of the Book of Isaiah (1:1-27). The letters are clearly scratched onto the parchment with a metal nib and black 'India' ink, neither of which were in use in the 3rd or 4th centuries, but which were in wide use during the 19th. In the same ink, there are further badly written Greek characters overwriting the text.

The title above column 1 is very clearly the Greek form of Isaiah. And then there is beside it, in the same scrawl but made with a finer nib than the overwriting, some now indecipherable Greek characters which have been erased. The one word that can be made out is (Greek) (?), meaning 'hammer' in modern Greek, though what that's supposed to convey is a mystery. And why wasn't it erased with the other words immediately above it? The British Library website offers no transcription - as they do in most other instances - of these erased characters. Not even (Grk) is transcribed or explained, and that is clear to read.

Just two folios further on (at Q43-f-3) and we have what is supposed to have been a wormhole. But this isn't just any wormhole. It is perfectly oblong, each corner of which consists of a perfect 90 degree right angle (see Fig. 20 below). The temptation to be amused is overwhelming, but we must constrain ourselves merely to noting that no worm known to nature ever made such a hole as this. Furthermore, there is no line of ingress in the page to track the journey of this Euclidean worm, and the adjacent pages are entirely untouched, meaning that it could not have munched its way through either of those. So how did this oblong aperture get there? It is clearly manmade, and an attempt to add a little mark of authenticity to the page. What the perpetrator forgot to do was to finish it.

Cooper may be referring to the 3rd column 26th line down on the recto.

We plan to correlate this with our information from other sources, including the CSP discussion. The Gavin Moorhead colour variance quadrangle is one example with a hole and another pic is near a hole.